_To William James._
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
February 2nd, 1895.
...The poor little play seems already, thank God, ancient history,
though I have lived through, in its company, the horridest four weeks of
my life. Produce a play and you will know, better than I can tell you,
how such an ordeal--odious in its essence!--is only made tolerable and
palatable by great success; and in how many ways accordingly non-success
may be tormenting and tragic, a bitterness of every hour, ramifying into
every throb of one's consciousness. Tonight the thing will have lived
the whole of its troubled little life of 31 performances, and will be
"taken off," to be followed, on Feb. 5th, by a piece by Oscar Wilde that
will have probably a very different fate. On the night of the 5th, too
nervous to do anything else, I had the ingenious thought of going to
some other theatre and seeing some other play as a means of being
coerced into quietness from 8 till 10.45. I went accordingly to the
Haymarket, to a new piece by the said O.W. that had just been
produced--"An Ideal Husband." I sat through it and saw it played with
every appearance (so far as the crowded house was an appearance) of
complete success, and _that_ gave me the most fearful apprehension. The
thing seemed to me so helpless, so crude, so bad, so clumsy, feeble and
vulgar, that as I walked away across St. James's Square to learn my own
fate, the prosperity of what I had seen seemed to me to constitute a
dreadful presumption of the shipwreck of _G.D._, and I stopped in the
middle of the Square, paralyzed by the terror of this
probability--afraid to go on and learn more. "How _can_ my piece do
anything with a public with whom _that_ is a success?" It couldn't--but
even then the full truth was, "mercifully," not revealed to me; the
truth that in a short month my piece would be whisked away to make room
for the triumphant Oscar. If, as I say, this episode has, by this time,
become ancient history to me, it is, thank heaven, because when a thing,
for me (a piece of work,) is done, it's done: I get quickly detached and
away from it, and am wholly given up to the better and fresher life of
the next thing to come. This is particularly the case now, with my
literary way blocked so long and my production smothered by these
theatrical lures: I have such arrears on hand and so many things seem to
wait for me--that I want far more and that it will be nobler to do--that
I am looking in a very different direction than in that of the
sacrificed little play. Partly for this reason, this receiving from you
all the retarded echo of my reverse and having to live over it with you
(you must excuse me if I don't do so much,) is the thing, in the whole
business, that has been most of an anguish and that I dreaded most in
advance. As for the play, in three words, it has been, I think I may
say, a rare and distinguished private success and scarcely anything at
all of a public one. By a private success, I mean with the even
moderately cultivated, civilised and intelligent _individual_, with
"people of taste" in short, of almost any kind, as distinguished from
the vast English Philistine mob--the regular "theatrical public" of
London, which, of all the vulgar publics London contains, is the most
brutishly and densely vulgar. This congregation the things they do like
sufficiently judge.... I no sooner found myself in the presence of those
yelling barbarians of the first night and learned what could be the
savagery of their disappointment that one wasn't perfectly the _same_ as
everything else they had ever seen, than the dream and delusion of my
having made a successful appeal to the cosy, childlike, naif, domestic
British imagination (which was what I had calculated) dropped from me in
the twinkling of an eye. I saw they couldn't care one straw for a damned
young last-century English Catholic, who lived in an old-tune Catholic
world and acted, with every one else in the play, from remote and
romantic Catholic motives. The whole thing was, for them, remote, and
all the intensity of one's ingenuity couldn't make it anything else. It
has made it something else for the _few_--but that is all. Such is the
bare history of poor G.D.--which, I beg you to believe, throws no light
on my "technical skill" which isn't a light that that mystery ought to
rejoice to have thrown. The newspaper people muddle things up with the
most foredoomed crudity; and I am capable of analysing the whole thing
far more scientifically and drawing from it lessons far more pertinent
and practical than all of them put together. It is perfectly true that
the novelist has a fearful long row to hoe to get into any practical
relation to the grovelling stage, and his difficulty is precisely
double: it bears, on one side, upon the question of method and, on the
other, upon the question of subject. If he is really in earnest, as I
have been, he surmounts the former difficulty before he surmounts the
latter. I have worked like a horse--far harder than any one will ever
know--over the whole stiff mystery of "technique"--I have run it to
earth, and I don't in the least hesitate to say that, for the
comparatively poor and meagre, the piteously simplified, purposes of the
English stage, I have made it absolutely my own, put it into my pocket.
The question of realising how different is the attitude of the
theatre-goer toward the quality of thing which might be a story in a
book from his attitude toward the quality of thing that is given to him
as a story in a play is another matter altogether. _That_ difficulty is
portentous, for any writer who doesn't approach it naively, as only a
very limited and simple-minded writer can. One has to _make_ one's self
so limited and simple to conceive a subject, see a subject, simply
enough, and that, in a nutshell, is where I have stumbled. And yet if
you were to have seen my play! I haven't been near the theatre since the
second night, but I shall go down there late this evening to see it
buried and bid good-bye to the actors.... I am very sorry for Marion
Terry, who has delighted in her part and made the great hit of her
career, I should suppose, in it, and who has to give it up thus
untimely. Her charming acting has done much for the little run.... The
money disappointment is of course keen--as it was wholly for money I
adventured. But the poor four weeks have brought me $1,100--which shows
what a tidy sum many times four weeks would have brought; without my
lifting, as they say, after the first performance, a finger.
I have written you so long-windedly on this matter that I have left
neither time nor space for anything else. I must catch the post and will
write more sociably something by the next one. One's time, in the whole
history, has gone like water, and still it pours out. _Please_ don't
send me anything out of newspapers.
Always your
HENRY.
_To Sidney Colvin._
The first of Stevenson's letters to be published, it will be
remembered, were the "Vailima Letters" to Sir Sidney Colvin.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
Feb. 19th, 1895.
My dear Colvin,
I shall send you all the Vailima Letters back to-morrow or next day by
hand. I have completely read them. I can't say, and I don't want to say,
anything of them but "Publish them--they make the man so loveable." It's
on _that_ I should take my stand. I think your estimate of them as
ranking high in their class (epistolary) is perhaps (if I remember what
you seemed to express of it) a larger one than I should concur in; but I
think still more that that makes little difference; for they will
assuredly be _liked_--immensely, and that is mainly what one is
concerned to ask for him. They are charming, living, touching,
absolutely natural; and I think _better_ toward the end than at the
beginning. What they suffer from is: 1º Want of interest and want of
clearness as to the subject-matter of much of them--the Samoan
personalities, politics, &c; all to me almost squalid--and the
irritating effect of one's sense of his clearing the very ground to be
able to do his daily work. Want also to a certain extent of
_generalization_ about all these matters and some others--into the
dreary specifics of which the reader perhaps finds himself plunged too
much. 2º A certain tormenting effect in his literary confidences (to
you,) glimpses, promises, revelations &c., arising from his so seldom
telling the subject, the _idea_ of the thing--what he sees, what he
wants to do, &c--as against his pouring forth titles, chapters,
divisions, names &c, in such magnificent abundance.--On the other hand
the personality shines out so beautiful and there are so many charming
things--passages, pages--that not to publish them would seem to me like
the burial of something alive. I see but little in what you have left in
these copies to excise on grounds of discretion, unless it be many of
those reports of the state of public affairs and allusions to public
personages which are _primarily_ excisable by reason of obscurity,
failure to appeal to reader's interest, &c. But I should like to see you
and talk about the matter with you better than thus, and shall take the
earliest occasion. The hideous sadness of them--to _us_! To readers at
large--no. But I feel as though I had been sitting with him for hours.
Yours always,
HENRY JAMES.
_To Mrs. John L. Gardner._
Royal Hospital, Dublin.
March 23d, 1895.
Dear Isabella Gardner,
Yes, I have delayed hideously to write to you, since receiving your note
of many days ago. But I always delay hideously, and my shamelessness is
rapidly becoming (in the matter of letter-writing) more disgraceful even
than my procrastination. I brought your letter with me to Ireland more
than a fortnight ago with every intention of answering it on the morrow
of my arrival; but I have been leading here a strange and monstrous life
of demoralisation and frivolity and the fleeting hour has mocked, till
today, at my languid effort to stay it, to clutch it, in its passage. I
have been paying three monstrous visits in a row; and if I needed any
further demonstration of the havoc such things make in my life I should
find it in this sense of infidelity to a charming friendship of so many
years.
I return to England to enter a monastery for the rest of my days--and
crave your forgiveness before I take this step. I have been staying in
this queer, shabby, sinister, sordid place (I mean Dublin,) with the
Lord Lieutenant (poor young Lord Houghton,) for what is called (a
fragment, that is, of what is called) the "Castle Season," and now I am
domesticated with very kind and valued old friends, the Wolseleys--Lord
W. being commander of the forces here (that is, head of the little
English army of occupation in Ireland--a five-years appointment) and
domiciled in this delightfully quaint and picturesque old structure, of
Charles II's time--a kind of Irish Invalides or Chelsea Hospital--a
retreat for superannuated veterans, out of which a commodious and
stately residence has been carved. We live side by side with the 140
old red-coated cocked-hatted pensioners--but with a splendid great
rococo hall separating us, in which Lady Wolseley gave the other night
the most beautiful ball I have ever seen--a fancy-ball in which all the
ladies were Sir Joshuas, Gainsboroughs, or Romneys, and all the men in
uniform, court dress or evening hunt dress. (_I_ went as--guess
what!--alas, nothing smarter than the one black coat in the room.) It is
a world of generals, aide-de-camps and colonels, of military colour and
sentinel-mounting, which amuses for the moment and makes one reflect
afresh that in England those who _have_ a good time have it with a
vengeance. The episode at the tarnished and ghost-haunted Castle was
little to my taste, and was a very queer episode indeed--thanks to the
incongruity of a vice-regal "court" (for that's what it considers
itself) utterly boycotted by Irish (landlord) society--the present
viceroy being the nominee of a home-rule government, and reduced to
dreary importation from England to fill its gilded halls. There was a
ball every night, etc., but too much standing on one's hind-legs--too
much pomp and state--for nothing and nobody. On my return (two days
hence) to my humble fireside I get away again as quickly as possible
into the country--to a cot beside a rill, the address of which no man
knoweth. There I remain for the next six months to come; and nothing of
any sort whatever is to happen to me (this is all arranged,) save that
you are to come down and stay a day or two with me when you come to
England. There is, alas, to be no "abroad" for me this year. I rejoice
with you in _your_ Rome--but my Rome is in the buried past. I spent,
however, last June there, and was less excruciated than I feared. Have
you seen my old friend Giuseppe Primoli--a great friend, in particular,
of the Bourgets? I dare say you have breakfasted deep with him. May
this find you perched on new conquests. It's vain to ask you to write
me, or tell me, anything. Let me only ask you therefore to believe me
your very affectionate old friend.